Sustainability, energy focus of films at Notre Dame forum

Mike OÂ?ConnellÂ?s introduction to coal mining culture came during one of the many weekend trips his family took to the West Virginia mountains.

Â?I was about 8 years old, and people were talking about a man whoÂ?s house had been dynamited,Â? OÂ?Connell says by telephone from his home in Pittsboro, N.C. Â?For some reason, that story stayed with me.Â?

So when the now-47-year-old OÂ?Connell began making documentary films, he returned to the playground of his youth. What he discovered, thanks to a controversial coal mining practice, was a very different landscape.

Â?Mountain Top Removal,Â? OÂ?ConnellÂ?s 74-minute documentary, is one of a series of films to be shown through Sept. 26 in conjunction with the 2008 University of Notre Dame Forum on Sustainable Energy. The film series begins tonight with several short films at the DeBartolo Performing Arts Center and continues with screenings of Â?Who Killed the Electric Car,Â? on Sunday, Â?An Inconvenient Truth,Â? on Tuesday, Â?Mountain Top RemovalÂ? on Thursday and Â?FuelÂ? (formerly titled Â?Fields of FuelÂ?) on Sept. 26.

OÂ?Connell and actor William Mapother, a 1987 Notre Dame graduate who narrates Â?Mountain Top Removal,Â? will answer questions following ThursdayÂ?s screenings.

Â?We felt that these films captured a broad range of topics,Â? DeBartolo managing director Jon Vickers says. Â?Hydro-electric energy and the environmental changes that at least one of these major projects cause, the use and cost of using coal, and alternatives to oil, mainly bio-diesel.Â?

What these films have in common, however, are issues, such as mountaintop removal, which have long struggled to find a voice.

Mountaintop removal uses explosives to expose embedded veins of coal by shattering 1,000 vertical feet of soil and rock. A proliferation of the practice in West Virginia in the past eight years has destroyed habitat, threatened waterways and exposed residents to toxic slurry ponds.

Â?I donÂ?t think people are really aware of the damage it does,Â? Maphother says. Â?This is an area that is the main source of water for the Eastern seaboard from New York City to Savannah.Â?

OÂ?Connell, who shot Â?Mountain Top RemovalÂ? over two years beginning in 2006, has seen his film create enough of a debate that it may lead to policy changes.

In May, North Carolina state Rep. Pricey Harrison (Dem.) introduced legislation to outlaw importation of coal that has been extracted by mountaintop removal. The bill would make half the coal burned in North Carolina power plants illegal.

Â?I donÂ?t know about its chances of passing,Â? OÂ?Connell says, Â?but itÂ?s kind of a shot across (the coal companyÂ?s) bow.Â?